1. Field of the Invention
The present disclosure relates to methods and systems for protecting software from unauthorized copying and reverse-engineering.
2. Description of Related Art
Many different methods of installing software and protecting installed software exist in the art. As used herein, software protection includes adding copy control and anti reverse engineering functionality to an existing application, either before or after it is compiled. Such software protection operates to prevent unauthorized copying or reverse engineering of the software that is being protected. As such, software protection does not provide core functionality to the end user or drive distribution of software products, and may require programming expertise different from what is needed for the core software to develop. Therefore, protection may often be added to a software product after the product's core functionality has been designed, implemented, and tested. It is often desired to add software protection after a software product has completed testing and has been implemented as an application installation image configured for installation on client computers. The original installation image, which does not include the desired software protection features, must therefore be altered to include them.
As used herein, an “installation image” refers to all executable and non-executable data making up a software product application and all of its supporting data or applications, configured for encoding on a computer-readable medium or for transmission to a client for storage on or in a computer-readable medium. As used herein, “executable data,” “executable code,” “software executable,” or generally, “executable” means that the executable data, code or software is capable of being executed by a computer processor after being installed in the computer system. Prior to being installed, the data, code or software may, or may not, be in executable form. Executable software that becomes executable after being installed may nonetheless not be executable until installation on is completed. For example, the software executable may need to be first decrypted, assembled or decoded during an installation process. The installation image makes up the encoded data package that computer users obtain, for example, when they purchase a software product encoded on an optical disc, or download a software application. In each case the installation image includes all of the encoded information required to install the software product on a client computer.
To provide software protection for an existing software product having a completed installation image, developers of software protection often rebuild the installation image of an application to include protected versions of the main software components that make up the software product to be protected. This process requires a complete rebuild of the target product installation image, and the additional testing, quality assurance and time that this entails. Thus, software protection costs may be exacerbated by the practice of adding software protection after the application has been compiled, tested and placed into production. In addition, in such cases the original software developers, testers and quality assurance personnel may have become unavailable, causing delay in adding the software protection capabilities to the target product. For example, addition or software protection may be delayed until the release of the next version of the product, resulting in considerable exposure of the unprotected version of the software to the risk of copyright piracy or unauthorized reverse engineering.
It is desirable, therefore, to provide a method or system for adding software protection to an existing application installation image, that overcomes the limitations of the prior art as exemplified above.